Cibercultura, Cultura Livre, Software Livre e afins

Categoria: KDE

Almost two weeks ago we had the seventh edition of the LaKademy, an event that has been held in Brazil since 2012. As you may know LaKademy’s main goal is to get together the Latin American contributors of KDE community and to attract new ones. We don’t have talks like in Akademy because the event’s idea is to be a space for sprints. So people work in small groups doing specific tasks like fixing bugs, developing new features or translating software and documentation.

LaKademy banner.

LaKademy 2018 was the biggest one so far. This year we had 23 participants of which 12 were newcomers. This is an impressive number of new people attending the event, the biggest number in all these years. We were very happy to have them all working with KDE projects in Florianópolis, an amazing island located in the South of Brazil.

LaKademy 2018 group photo.

Among these new people we had a group from UFF (Universidade Federal Fluminense), a public university from Rio de Janeiro state, Brazil, who are working with KDE Edu project. One of them, Maria Edoarda, made an amazing pixel art of Konqi that was printed using a 3D printer we had there. That was a cute gift for the community in its 22th birthday ❤

Edoarda proud of her pixel art.

Speaking of anniversary, we also had a cake to celebrate the date. We bought a traditional cake from the South of Brazil called “cuca” that we preferred to call “kuka” 🙂

Kuka and Konqi 😀 The group celebrating 22th KDE birthday with a “kuka”.

During LaKademy I worked on the KDE timeline project that I’ve developed with Camila Ayres in 2016 for KDE 20 years celebration. The timeline was outdated and needed to have new info about the last two years added. So I made some changes like in the header to make this project follow the history of the community beyond the 20th anniversary. When I had the idea to create it my first thought was just use it for the celebrations of the 20th birthday, but now I think the project might be useful to keep a record about the evolution of our community.

We’ve made konqi mugs for the attendees 🙂

There is a moment at the LaKademy where everybody participate of discussions about promo things like how to attract more users and contributors to the community, what should be our actions for the next year, which place we should choose for the next LaKademy. During our promo meeting this year we discussed the possibility of doing the event outside Brazil. This is an old idea and we’ve been trying to do this since the second edition.

The main obstacle that prevents us to do this is the cost of bringing everybody to another country. As we have the majority of the contributors in Brazil it’s cheaper for us just make the event here. On the other hand we need to connect with people from the others Latin American countries, otherwise the name of this event makes no sense. We do have people from outside Brazil attending LaKademy but they were never a high number. Bring the event to another country might help us to increase this participation.

As part of the anniversary celebrations we also went for a karaoke bar at night. That was one of the most funny moments of the LaKademy. This moment was a very nice opportunity to new and old contributors get to know each other better, have a break from the tiring routine of the sprints, and of course show their talent 😀

Nerds just wanna have fun 😀LaKademy band ❤

Now our community have a person very good with communication and promo stuff and she is doing a very good job. Thank you, Barbara! She made this nice video to show the world some moments from LaKademy in 1 minute:

I would like to thank Patrick for his support in Florianópolis, organizing the event there and helping us with everything. I also wanna say thank you to the KDE e.V. that has been supported us all these years.

LaKademy is always a very reinvigorating moment for me, especially right now that Brazil is facing a difficult moment of growth of the far right and fascism. Being there with all these nice people sharing code but also sharing dreams and love is a form of resist to this wave of hate. I hope that more new people can come to this amazing event and see by themselves how is worth be in a friendly community like KDE. Happy 22 years, my community! ❤

This year I attended to my fourth Akademy, the annual KDE summit. The conference is always a good place to meet old and new KDE people. This year we had a lot of new faces showing up there, which is very good because new people might mean new ideas coming, more hands to work on KDE projects, and more mouths to spread our message 🙂 From Brazil we had three new contributors attending for the first time, Lays, Caio and Eliakin, from a total of eight Brazilians who participated this year. I think we can count with Tomaz and Helio although they are living in Germany 🙂

Brazilian group at Akademy 2018.

As part of the conference program we had some good talks and the usual BoF’s (Birds of a Feather) sessions. This year, as part of our effort to get more people from Latin America to participate to LaKademy, the Latin American KDE Summit, we decided to host a BoF about KDE in America. Actually we were more interested in discuss with people from the three Americas about if we should try to make a big conference gathering all of us from South, North and Central America. We thought about a conference that could revive the Camp KDE and at the same time to get LaKademy outside of Brazil. Some possibilities were thought, like organize a conference in Cuba, Argentina, or in Colombia, because these are places where we might have local KDE teams to help with that. This is an idea that still needs to be matured, but the kick-off to thinking about a better integration of contributors in America has already been given.

In addition to BoF’s and talks, Akademy this year offered some trainings, which I thought was a great idea. The attendees could choose among four different trainings: Nonviolent Communication, Online Fundraising and Campaigning, Documentation writing for non-writers, and Public Speaking Training. Before the event I was very excited to participate in the non-violent communication training because I’ve been reading the Marshall Rosenberg’s book and enjoying to think of new forms of communications, especially a more empathetic one.

Be able to communicate with people inside a big and diverse community like ours without using a violent language that provokes conflicts is a important goal that we should pursue as a community. The Akademy team is to be congratulated for having offered for us such a great opportunity to think and to practice non-violent communication in our context. I think we should have more this in the next Akademies. In my opinion, one of the ways we can attract more contributors to our community is making the environment even more friendly and the language we use to express ourselves is a very important part of this. So, to finish this post, I would like to say that my main highlight and insight from Akademy this year was think about empathy in our community. After all, for me Free Software it’s all about community <3.

The Latin America KDE Summit, LaKademy, just started today in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil. The country is in the middle of a general strike, which I’m supporting, but the LaKademy couldn’t stop. We’ve been organizing this meeting for a year.

The event will last until May 1, Internacional Worker’s Day. This year LaKademy is celebrating its 5th edition. It’s a special time to celebrate our activities here in Latin America and keep up the work to attract more contributors to community.

LaKademy stickers.

This edition we have 6 new people attending to LaKademy, it’s a great number considering that the summit have 16 people in total. We hope all of them can keep contribute with community and also bring more people too 🙂

Almost everyone gathered, some will still arrive.

In these raining days here in BH (how people lovingly call the city), I intend to finish the LaKademy website and work with some translations stuffs. I also plan to do my usual work, which is to think in ways to spread the KDE word to the world :).